More than you ever wanted to know about the green quilt

Down in the comments, K.M. said:

did you randomly choose greens for half square triangles and then lay them out or was there more of a plan?

...and since I know that not everybody reads the comments (I don't, not on every single weblog I read!) I thought I'd answer this up here.

There was sort of a plan. This is how I tend to work - I start out with at least some glimmer of an idea what I'm doing, but I also leave myself some wriggle-room to improvise. (Like, if you look in the April posts where I had first started cutting fabric - here - I was talking about just placing the fabrics randomly, and you see that's gone by the board.) I guess you could say that I started cutting randomly, or actually it's probably more accurate to say I cut inclusively, because what I did was cut a 5" strip out of every single fabric I had that was predominantly green, and then cut squares out of that. I cut a ton of 5" squares since some of these were selvage-to-selvage strips, so I got up to 8 squares out of every strip.

As I cut, I made three piles - one complete set, one almost-complete set (because there were a few scraps that didn't even yield two squares), and one really big pile that was everything that was left. And somewhere in the middle of cutting, I started separating the first pile into lights, mediums and darks. So then when I paired the squares off to make my triangles, I paired up a lighter and a darker one - usually either a light with a medium, or a medium with a dark. This quilt really depends on having pairs with a noticeable contrast between them. (And because I'm a nut about playing with color - it's my favorite part of the process, really - I also tried to come up with pairs that looked nice together. But I really think that that part is unnecessary. The contrast is what matters.)

I'm going to do some tinkering around before I sew tomorrow, but I'm definitely going to get this assembled. (I sort of have to, because my mother wants her design wall back!) So check back for new pictures late tomorrow night or sometime Sunday.


By the way, if you read carefully up there you notice that I still have an extremely large stash of green nickel squares left. So if somebody wants to do a swap, I could probably be persuaded to part with some of them. (And you wouldn't have to only give me green squares back. Other colors might be very nice, at this point!) The only thing is that I can't guarantee that they are perfectly accurate 5" squares - I wasn't being terribly, terribly careful to be 100% accurate because I knew I was making 4-1/2" triangles and thus I had a little wiggle room. But they're all pretty close.